Tag Archives: economics

Death Tax

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Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton demurs from Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s plan to repeal the death tax—the 40% tax on a man’s estate that the government currently claims because the man was rude enough to die.  Never mind that the man’s heirs might have a claim on the money—no, it’s Government’s money, says the Progressive Democrat.

Clinton claims she wants to build schools, cancel student loans, and provide health care to veterans with the proceeds from that death tax.

Let’s review the bidding.

Clinton has no intention of building voucher or charter schools; she only wants to build “public” schools run by her supporting teachers unions—crony capitalism in our education system.

Clinton’s wish to cancel student loans sends an equally terrible signal: that private citizens aren’t responsible for their own debts or their own actions: government will take care of it for them.  Which puts government in charge of those citizens’ choices, too, but carefully elides that part of her wish.

Clinton’s claims regarding our veterans’ health?  Compare that with the Democratic administration’s handling of the Veterans Affairs and its abject failure regarding our veterans’ health.  The Obama administration has taken no meaningful steps to correct that disaster (some might say refused to take steps), and she brags about wanting to continue President Barack Obama’s (D) policies.  And she says nothing to reconcile the opposition between her veterans-related claims on the one hand and her veterans-related claims on the other.

There’s another aspect to this death tax of hers, too.  Most of the estates being inherited (or which inheritance is blocked by the death tax) are in the form of small, family businesses and farms—businesses which usually have to be sold off to raise the cash to pay the vig tax.  And that leaves the surviving families, those heirs, without the means to earn their livelihood.

The Progressive Socialist Goal Made Manifest

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In the context of Aetna’s decision to sharply curtail its participation in ObamaMart—because such participation was costing Aetna millions of dollars—Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) has said openly

The provision of health care cannot continue to be dependent upon the whims and market projections of large private insurance companies whose only goal is to make as much profit as possible.

Because making money—the engine of economic growth and the economic welfare of all Americans—is inappropriate when it’s done outside Government control.  American businesses and Americans can’t be allowed to earn more than Government deems fit.  President Barack Obama (D) has held this before Sanders became a public fixture:

I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service.

Of course, the Progressive-Democrat Obama considered it to be Government’s role to determine the goodness of that product or service, not the private citizens choosing to buy, not to buy, that product or service.

Sanders’ disdain for private insurers’ market projections and their goal to make as much profit as possible are easily extensible to the economy as a whole.  That Progressives in the Democratic Party are demanding a government option to “compete” with private enterprise in ObamaMart is a clear demonstration of where that Party will take our economy the moment they gain control of our government.

You can bet Progressive-Democrat and Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton soon will be echoing Sanders’ call for government control of our economy in her effort to retain Sanders’ supporters and to extend Obama’s policies.

This will be the Progressive Socialist economy.

SEC and Boardroom Diversity

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The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking to reach inside corporate governance some more because it Knows Better how to run a company than do the leaders and managers of that company.  The latest travesty is a new rule requiring disclosure of the diversity—by which the SEC means ethnic and gender diversity—of a public company’s board of directors.  This would be an expansion of the SEC’s existing 2009 rule requiring companies to disclose their plans for diversity.

Berkshire Hathaway took the correct position in its SEC disclosure regarding those plans:

Berkshire does not have a policy regarding the consideration of diversity in identifying nominees for director. In identifying director nominees, the Governance Committee does not seek diversity, however defined. Instead, as previously discussed, the Governance Committee looks for individuals who have very high integrity, business savvy, an owner-oriented attitude and a deep genuine interest in the Company.

This, though, isn’t politically correct enough to suit the SEC; hence the new rule under consideration.  It isn’t enough that a company should seek actual talent and skill, it must seek the government-directed correct balance of gender and ethnicity.

This raises a question in my mind: would that be biological ethnicity and gender or self-identified ethnicity and gender?

For the record, I self-identify my ethnicity as American, and I self-identify my gender as The US Male.

Clinton State Department and Influence

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Shortly after Hillary Clinton left the Obama administration, the State Department quietly took steps to purchase real estate in Nigeria from a firm whose parent company is owned by a major donor to the Clinton Foundation, records obtained by Fox News show.

This should have been a routine expression of interest and possibly consummated (in the event, it never was) Department real estate transaction, as James Rosen noted in his piece.

However.

The principle in the proposed deal is Ronald Chagoury,

the brother and business partner, in the Chagoury Group, of Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-born businessman whom federal records show has donated between $1 and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.

The real estate in question is—was (and maybe still is; the exposed records are not all the story)—reclaimed land:

[A] staggeringly ambitious undertaking: the dredging of millions of tons of sand from the sea floor off Victoria Island and the creation of an estimated 3.5 square miles of new land, on which the Chagourys aim to establish what they call a “21st century city…for residential, commercial, financial and tourist development.”

As Citizens United President David Bossie described the thing,

A month after Bill Clinton visits a Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury-run land project in Nigeria, the US State Department wants to buy the same land.  Who could be so lucky?  A major donor to the Clinton Foundation, that’s who.

Hmm….

What’s also interesting about this story is that the rest of the media are spiking it.  Yes, it was a Fox News exclusive, but since Fox News broke the story on Wednesday, none of the rest of the media have picked it up: NBC, CBS, ABC—all are studiously ignoring it.

Again, hmm….

What’s in Store

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…for the rest of us.  Kate Vershov Downing is a Liberal who has been mugged by reality.  She is—or was until she resigned—a member of the Palo Alto, CA, Planning and Transportation Commission, the city’s central planning facility for all things a private citizen might want to do.  Here’s an excerpt from her letter of resignation from that Commission, via PJMedia‘s Tom Knighton.  (Unfortunately, she’s not completely learned the mugging lesson; she and her husband are moving to another California city.)

After many years of trying to make it work in Palo Alto, my husband and I cannot see a way to stay in Palo Alto and raise a family here. We rent our current home with another couple for $6200 a month; if we wanted to buy the same home and share it with children and not roommates, it would cost $2.7M and our monthly payment would be $12,177 a month in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. That’s $146,127 per year—an entire professional’s income before taxes. This is unaffordable even for an attorney and a software engineer.

There’s more—much more—in her letter of resignation.

It’s clear that if professionals like me cannot raise a family here, then all of our teachers, first responders, and service workers are in dire straits. We already see openings at our police department that we can’t fill and numerous teacher contracts that we can’t renew because the cost of housing is astronomical not just in Palo Alto but many miles in each direction.

But Palo Alto’s fellow commission members, Liberal Planners all, either don’t care, don’t understand, or perhaps worst of all: they got theirs, and the rest can go hang.

Small steps like allowing 2 floors of housing instead of 1 in mixed use developments, enforcing minimum density requirements so that developers build apartments instead of penthouses, legalizing duplexes, easing restrictions on granny units, leveraging the residential parking permit program to experiment with housing for people who don’t want or need two cars, and allowing single-use areas like the Stanford shopping center to add housing on top of shops (or offices), would go a long way in adding desperately needed housing units while maintaining the character of our neighborhoods and preserving historic structures throughout.

But the P&T Commission as a whole Knows Better and has steadfastly refused to allow private citizens, private enterprises, to do these simple things.

This Council has…charted a course for the next 15 years of this city’s development….

Because the Commission members are fortune tellers and seers; they Know what’s going to happen before it happens.

Downing closed with this bit of irony:

We should take care to remember that Palo Alto is famous the world over for its residents’ accomplishments, but none of those people would be able to live in Palo Alto were they starting out today.

This Know Better attitude is what we can look forward to nation-wide if the Progressive-Democrat Party wins the White House this year and with it the Senate.